Thursday, May 28, 2015

Which just lost 90% of the people who were reading this. Of course most of those people were probably 12
years old and without cheat codes they weren't going to stick around anyway.

For those of you that remain, I'll attempt to explain why I
feel that way.

It's pretty simple really, it comes down to this:

Pro Gaming has turned something fun into something serious
and ultimately ruined the experience for everyone.

Games like Counter Strike, StarCraft and DOTA have become virtual
grind fests completely devoid of amusement.
Watching a tournament is like watching fast food workers during the
lunch rush.

Increasingly, new releases are being produced with competitive
gameplay in mind catering to a gaming culture that reveres the
"skills" of "professional" gamers. The result are games that are either
needlessly complex or boring grind fests stripped of all but the most basic
elements.

But take away the stadium crowds, pyrotechnics and Rock
Concert atmosphere of the average championship and suddenly a DOTA 2
competition makes watching a ping pong match look exciting. I mean how much fun is it to sit there for
hours watching someone play a game.

Yeah, I know TWITCH and HITBOX are all about that. I'm on
both of them. But I'm not a pro and
don't want to be. I just like to share
the fun. In fact watching TWITCH streams
often inspires me to play and helps me to enjoy the experience more by learning
from other players. If I land on a
pro-gaming stream, however, I tend to fall asleep after a few minutes of
endless grinding on the same map.

Hey I love video games. In fact it's that love that lies at the heart of
my irritation with a fake construct.

Pro gaming
is less about the game and more about the gamer and believe it or not that's
wrong. It's a product of the
hype perpetrated by game publishers and enthusiast hardware vendors. It's product is reflected in overpriced
Triple-A titles, DLC disease and the delusional construct of the "Pro Gamer."

I say delusion because there's an entire population of
gamers who actually think that playing video games is now somehow equivalent to
other "professions"

I understand the push to redefine paradigms when it comes to
what you do for a living. Hell, I've
been beating that drum for 20 years and try to live by my own example. Do what you're good at and let that define
your value. The superficial nonsense
that defined our parent's reality simply doesn't apply anymore. So yeah, I get it.

But there's such a thing as taking it too far and professional gaming
has done exactly that.

The variables of the "real" world dictate a need
for "real" skills to succeed. Video
Games, on the other hand, operate in a
sandbox. A video game by its very nature
places you in an environment with strictly defined rules and outcomes. There's no such thing as "out of the
box" thinking when the "box" is your entire world. If you play long enough you'll eventually
master every conceivable aspect of it in a relatively short period of
time.

Real life doesn't work that way and neither do real skills. Now before I go off on some rant about how
video games don't require "skills" I'll just say this. If playing a video game requires any measure
of skill then where would you put it on a resume?

What's its market value?
Do you actually believe it compares to the skills of the people who actually made the game?

Sadly, people see an equivalence based on unrelenting hype
from an industry only too happy to prime the pump with flashy competitions and
false legitimacy for the participants.

Which is exactly why pro gaming fucks up video games.

When you turn an entertainment medium into a
competitive sport all the crap that goes with it comes along for the ride. It's the competition and not the quality of
the game that matters.

And that's just wrong.

Maybe 1/10th of the people who buy a game do so because they
plan to play it competitively. Of that
number most will never explore any more of the game than the tournament
requires. To keep things fair most
competitions only involve a subset of the entire game. No mods, no campaigns, no DLC. Meaning game modes like Campaign and Co-op
start to disappear.

"Pros" don't
need them. Add a new game engine and
some flashy effects and the latest incarnation of Battlefield launches with
half the features of its predecessor with nary a peep of complaint.

Well, at least none they need to pay attention to. Because of pro gaming, major publishers get to
release a lesser game for more money than the one it's replacing.

So-called "Professional" gaming leagues like the ESL, MLG and PGL all enjoy major sponsorship from
the likes of EA, and Valve not to mention enthusiast hardware vendors like AMD
and NVIDIA.

Meaning they'd rather dump millions into hype and false
relevancy than improve what more often than not are buggy, overpriced products.

So the next time you think playing a video game involves
skill, remember what that belief is costing you in crappy game releases and
higher prices for less content.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

You know you've been there.The perfect storm where it just seems like everything is conspiring
against you.

This is a gaming blog so I'm not talking about your lousy
boss or the irritation of your significant other...

No, it's about how you thought you'd be gaming till dawn but
instead ended up flipping through seasons of Community.

In case you haven't guessed, I just had one of those.

It's a special kind of masochism that makes a gamer spend
hours beating their head against the same wall and so it was with me.

The game I'm currently spending the most time with is Path of Exile. Like most players I have a few characters I
play and like anything else some are more entertaining than others. I enjoy a challenge but I don't enjoy stupid.

I've mentioned before my irritation with games that get unnecessarily difficult just to keep things interesting. Which is exactly why I spent
last night watching a lot of TV instead of gaming.

It started with Path of Exile and my level 52 Witch. She's my original character and the one
that's responsible for most of my time in the game. Unfortunately as I've gained more experience it's
become obvious that she's the equivalent of artillery in a game that favors infantry. Yes, she can do some nifty tricks but only if
she can survive long enough to light them off.

That's why the skill tree for the Witch is so heavy on
something called "minions."
Minions are the equivalent of an army on call and I've found that on
more than one occasion they've been the difference between survival and
defeat. Spawning a half dozen skeleton
warriors or zombies usually provides enough buffer for my witch to make the
fireworks happen.

But not last night.

No, last night I spent over an hour in Act 3's Crematorium
map running for my virtual life. This
map is the player's third encounter with one of the two antagonists in the
game, Piety. Unfortunately as you
advance in the game (especially in cruel mode) so too do the enemies you face. In some cases exponentially.

In case you don't know, death in the cruel
game mode not only brings the agony of defeat but the annoyance of losing 15
percent of your experience.

Long story short, Piety was eventually defeated but not
before I'd lost all the experience gained from battling through baddies to get
to her. OK, I know I signed up for this
but for some reason last night was worse than most. After 15 deaths I gave up. We went from challenging to stupid and I'd
had enough.

So I was still in a gaming mood and thought I'd give Star Trek Online another shot. Star Trek Online is a game that I'd spent a
few hundred hours in about 2 years ago.
At the time I found it a captivating and sometimes challenging RPG set
in a universe I dearly loved.

Recently it came to my attention that after the passing of
Leonard Nimoy the game developers had modified a few sections of the game as a
memorial. Initially I was playing via
Steam but on returning to the game after a 2 year hiatus, I found an 11GB
update waiting.

That's fine once but
apparently Cryptic ( the developer) wasn't keeping the game updated on Steam. That meant every time I launched it I was
forced to download the entire 11GB update again which was doing my 250GB data
cap no favors. So Steam was out at least as far as Star Trek Online was concerned.

I was determined to get a video of the in game memorials so
I decided to reinstall the game via the developers own service, Arc, which
solved my duplicate download problem.
Finally I could run the game.

Except for one thing.
I'd forgotten just how bad the user interface was. The game itself is ambitious and the most
immersive Star Trek gaming experience I've had but the learning curve is
steep.

Where I was battling fleets of Borg cubes and Romulans with
reckless abandon when I first played the game now I found myself battling the
UI just to get around.

Which brings us to last night. I had beamed my character down to New
Romulus and was exploring the map. I was
finding movement difficult and inventory management almost impossible but I was
managing.

At least I thought I was up to the point where I was
attacked by enemies and found my weapons not responding to my repeated mashing
of the FIRE key. I remember being able
to quickly use items from my inventory bar when I was regularly playing this
game. This time, however, it took a
number of mouse clicks. Not ideal when
in the middle of a heated battle with a Tholian Commander.

I used to be proficient in that game but something's gone
awry here. Control was never that great
to start with but it seems to have gotten worse over the past few years. Assuming you can dig through layers of
interface to find your key mappings, there's a very good chance it's all for
naught as the game is likely to ignore them.

After having my level 50 Vice Admiral knocked on his Vulcan
posterior a few dozen times it was evident that I just needed to stop beating
my head against the wall.

Another hour, some abuse of the furniture and I was
done. We'd again gone from challenging
to stupid. So stupid in fact that I
uninstalled Star Trek Online and it's ARC launcher.

Two games, two failures, one broken computer desk. Time to quit...

Thus ending the game night and beginning of couch potato
night.

I can only take so much abuse before I cut my
losses. I'm not that much of a
masochist.

Monday, May 11, 2015

If you're a gamer chances are you're on Steam and have even
posted a few videos on YouTube of your exploits. Until recently Steam allowed you to post your
YouTube videos to your account and make them available to other STEAM
users.

In my case, I've got over 200
videos shared on YouTube and for me it's another avenue to share my gaming
experiences and promote my content.

That was until today...

Around April 20th YouTube sent out a quiet little warning
to everyone who used their version 2.0 API to stream content to their
respective apps.

Apparently it was too quiet as 3 weeks have gone by and
today Steam will no longer allow me or any other Steam user to share videos
from YouTube.

What's annoying about this is that something so major has
gone largely unannounced and apparently unaddressed without so much as a post
in a STEAM forum. The only thing that
even suggested a warning was a strange little video that showed up in my Steam
video gallery.

Somebody dropped the ball...

Was it YouTube who has a history of making unilateral
changes to critical services without bothering to tell anyone till after the fact?

Was it Valve (STEAM) for not bothering to pay attention
subsequently crippling what has become a critical community tool?

Was it the users for not raising the red flag sooner? We all know that nobody listens to users
anymore unless they do something "viral"

Well, the answer is YES.
It's them and it's us but the only people with any power to affect
change in this case is STEAM. They've
been warned for at least 3 weeks, likely longer and have done absolutely
nothing. Worse they didn't bother to
warn the users or suggest a timetable for a fix.

Until they do I'd advise anyone who shares YouTube videos to
their STEAM profile to do the same thing that Valve has. That is, nothing. Don't unlink your account, don't mess with
your YouTube settings, nothing. Do
absolutely nothing with your video settings as many users have reported losing
the videos they already had on STEAM and being unable to reattach their YouTube
account.

Hopefully the next STEAM client update will finally address
the problem.

UPDATE! As of 4PM 5-13-2015 STEAM has fixed the YouTube issue and you can again post videos from your YouTube account. Note that you will have to RE-Link your YouTube account to STEAM but your old videos will still be there. If you tried to re-link your account before the fix, however, you may have to add your videos all over again.